Kimiko Yoshida *Japan/France

1963 // The self-portraits of Kimiko Yoshida are ways to sublimate or undo “backwards” a traumatized, childhood marked by abandonment and homelessness. His arrival in France in 1995 is experienced as a renaissance. His world now includes multifaceted people her memories, her little girl dreams and legends of his native country. The brides series, consisting of about sixty self-portraits, is an intimate trip which is defined as the art of the transition and the passage. From his experiences of the cultural “in-between”, Kimiko Yoshida made the thought of another part of his own identity: the ‘I’ is always a multiplied otherness, a narcissism not deadly but jubilant. His self-portraits, which she named “single brides”, are conjuratoires figures of the servile status of women, particularly in the face of arranged marriages, and are in turn in a parodic, satirical, angle a hysterical bit as its title: the bride into a work of art, the Pokémon bride, the bride cyber, the bride blinded…